Sunday, June 13, 2010

The Pennsylvania History Bill of Rights

If you belong to any Pennsylvania non-profit organization, you might want to encourage your group to subscribe to the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission's Pennsylvania History Bill of Rights. This heritage belongs to all Pennsylvanians--in fact, to all Americans. We need to let our state government know we care about it and want it saved.
Will the effort of endorsing this document change the daunting budgetary realities? No. But the things that survive over the long haul still are likely to be the things people are passionate about.
And we SHOULD be passionate about our heritage, and want to pass it on to our children and to visitors. We are the state where the Declaration of Independence was signed, where Washington wrestled with destiny at Valley Forge, where Meade struck a blow for human freedom and dignity at Gettysburg. And if many of the best-known sites are in federal hands, many, hardly less important, have been run by the state for years. If we lose them, we are going to be left poor indeed.
It costs nothing to subscribe to the Pennsylvania History Bill of Rights, and this is a commitment that your group almost certainly should make. I wish I could give you an easy email address for this, but it's a government url and I can't. A way to get there is to google the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission. You will find a prominent discussion of the initiative on the PHMC's home page; and you can download the form and print it out very easily.

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